How to keep your garage floor dry

Do you find pools of water on your garage floor as the rain drips and the snow melts off your car? Aside from posing a slip-and-fall risk and potential damage to the boxes and workbench that sit on your garage floor, those puddles often contain road salt, which will eat away at the concrete floor of your garage.

Garage floors should be pitched to drain the excess liquid out of your garage, but it seems that many aren't. Instead of redoing your entire garage to change the slope or add drains, you can buy a mat designed specifically for this purpose. They're not particularly cheap -- they start around $70 and go up from there -- but the price of the mat sure beats the price of redoing the garage or paying for an injury resulting from a slip in a puddle.

The mats come in various sizes, they have rubbery backings so they stay put, they are highly absorbent (they can take in gallons of water at a time) and they are made from durable polypropylene so that they last multiple seasons.

The liquid from your car evaporates off of them, so the only cleanup you have to do is to occasionally vacuum up the dirt left on the mat that came in with the car. You can find the mats for sale on many Websites and at some automotive shops.